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It’s St. Patrick’s Day and as with any noted day on the calendar, internet marketers can leverage this to make some cash. What I’m talking about specifically is using Google AdWords to zoom in on the numerous searches done today for St. Patrick’s Day from around the world.

A little success story before I go into more detail…
Back on February 14th (Valentine’s Day), I created an AdWords campaign targeting many crucial keywords people may be searching, such as cupid, hearts, love, red, roses, valentine etc. I launched a campaign early in the morning (around 5:00 am) and was promoting a CPA offer leading to a crush calculator (you know… the thing where you input your name and someone else’s name to see if you’re compatible). The offer itself was very “high schoolish”, but it doesn’t matter if you’re making money from it. I used a redirect in the URL I placed in AdWords and received $1.75 for every person that submitted their names to see if they were compatible with person X. By about 10:00 am my ad was pushed way down in the results that it wasn’t even appearing on the first two pages. I had obviously been outbid for my search words and didn’t feel like spending any more money to regain the top spot. That was okay though – for the first 5 hours my ad appeared on the first page of Google results I managed to make just over $320 USD (while spending only $50 on AdWords).

Here’s how you can apply this same method to St. Patrick’s Day:

Find a good CPA offer (cost per action) that pays you for collecting basic information, such as e-mail, zip codes etc. (Hint: Check on the “Money Makers” at the top of this site).

Create a Google AdWords campaign using some (or all) of the keywords you find using the Google Keyword Tool within the AdWords control panel. A preliminary search returns 150 words available for using the term “St. Patrick’s Day”.

Make sure your URL is redirected to a root domain. Don’t use the actual affiliate URL given by your CPA network.

Don’t bid more than you can afford. You don’t want to end up losing money.

Rinse and repeat. Take a look at your calendar and see if there are any other notable days coming up. Prepare early for the next one and cash those checks! 😎

I would say that’s one HELL of a return! Another thing is to be completely established in all major search engines and even some of the social networking platforms such as Facebook, or an ad buy on Bebo and the soon to be opened Myspace Open Advertising platform. By being established you often dont have to wait to get ads up and live or simply just call to speed the process.

You had a heck of return but you could have easily probably made a $1,000+ had you been up on the other engines as well. This is really great though man, that’s a killer ROI and the fact that you posted it to just get out there is very respectable.